A system to support long-term creative thinking in daily life and its evaluation

Most current creativity support systems support short-term temporal thinking that is separate from users' daily activities. In this paper, we propose a system that supports long-term idea-generation in daily life. The system consists of two subsystems: a management system for problems and ideas called IdeaManager; and a personal information storage system called iBox. When information is registered in iBox, it searches related problems and ideas in IdeaManager and then presents the results. Then users try to generate or enhance ideas for automatically retrieved problems or ideas using registered information as the hint. Our target users are those who must generate novel ideas and acquire relevant information for a certain problem or theme, such as researchers or planners. To evaluate and enhance our system, we carried out a six-week experiment. During this period, subjects managed their problems and ideas in their daily activities. In the experiment, several methods of searching for related problems and ideas in IdeaManager were compared. Based on the results, we give some proposals for future systems.